La Venganza de Pancho Villa: Resistance and Repetition

Essays

11Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 37:2 Fall 2012 © University of California Regents

La venganza de Pancho VillaResistance and Repetition

Laura Isabel Serna

AbstrAct: The compilation film La venganza de Pancho Villa (ca. 1930), created by itinerant exhibitor Félix Padilla, combines footage from two national cinematic tradi-tions—those of the United States and Mexico—to construct a biographical film about the regional hero and revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho” Villa. The film’s use of found footage offers a retort to American films rife with stereotypical images of Mexican masculinity. However, a close reading of the film in the context of local practices of film distribution and exhibition finds that the film expresses an oppositional consciousness shaped by the structures and ideologies of the dominant film industries it draws from, including a masculinist nationalism that reinscribes racial and gender hierarchies.

What I have from 1956 is one instant at the Holiday Theater, where a small dimension of a film, as in a dream, became the feature of the whole.

—Tino Villanueva, “Scene from the Movie GIANT”

In the space of a cinematic hour, Mexican revolutionary general and some-time rebel Francisco “Pancho” Villa (born Doroteo Arango) revels in his victory over Federalist forces at Torreón, loots the hacienda of a Spanish landowner, enters Mexico City in triumph, and faces off against US forces multiple times—all before retiring to life in the country and meeting his death at the wrong end of an assassin’s gun. La venganza de Pancho Villa, a biographical film produced and exhibited in the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez region in the 1930s, consists primarily of footage harvested from American silent feature films, serials, and newsreel footage from both the United States and Mexico. That footage is complemented by filmed still photo-graphs and bits of original scenes that the filmmaker, Félix Padilla, shot with his son Edmundo and friends.1 In the film, time is oddly compressed in some places and expanded in others. The same footage appears at different

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moments in the film, its meaning shifting depending on the context. Intertitles, some in Spanish, some bilingual, have been both appropriated from other films and newly created. Villa is played by at least four different actors, including Villa himself.

In 2009 La venganza was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. A press release declares that the film provides evidence of “a vital Mexican-American film presence during the 1910–30s” (Library of Congress 2009). Nonfiction filmmaker and preserva-tionist Gregorio Rocha, who was instrumental in having the film preserved by the Library of Congress, has called it a film maudit—a film before its time—that resembles the hybrid, oppositional media being produced in the US-Mexico borderlands today (2003, 29). The film is indeed prescient in its critique of American cinema’s one-dimensional portrayal of Villa as a bloodthirsty bandit. Its recontextualization of negative portrayals of Villa within a narrative of regional and national heroism disrupts the powerful stereotypes of Mexicans put into circulation by the American film industry, recuperating Villa and by extension all Mexican men.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, ethnic Mexicans in the United States regularly witnessed denigrating images of Mexico and Mexicans on screen. Moreover, they frequently viewed cinema in segregated spaces even as they, like their Anglo counterparts, derived pleasure from the social practice of moviegoing. That Mexican men were maligned on screen during this period will not be news. Beginning with the cheating greaser in A Tale of Texas (1909) and continuing through the 1910s and 1920s, on-screen Mexican masculinity took the form of a series of types—the greaser, the peon, the bandit, and later the revolutionary—characterized by negative qualities such as viciousness, laziness, deceitfulness, and ineptitude. As scholars such as Blaine P. Lamb (1975), Gary D. Keller (1985), Emilio García Riera (1987), and most recently Charles Ramírez Berg (2002) have demonstrated, these types became stock characters that functioned as convenient foils for white heroism.

These stereotypical depictions led Mexico to join other countries in protesting how they were portrayed in US films. Such protests were one

Laura IsabeL serna is an assistant professor of critical studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and other essays on cinema in Mexico and Mexican immigrant communities in the United States during the Silent Era. Her research interests include race and silent cinema, border film cultures, historical reception studies, and Mexican cinema.

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La venganza de Pancho Villa

of the factors that led to the institutionalization of the American film industry’s self-regulation with the appointment of Will Hays as head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in the early 1920s (Vasey 1997, 38–47). Though the industry shifted away from the explicit portrayal of Mexicans as villains, an array of deterritorialized evildoers, buffoonish revolutionaries, and sultry señoritas of indeterminate origin still populated American films and were easily connected to their phantom countries of origin (Serna 2006). Indeed, during the revolution, representations of Villa-like characters in US fiction films participated in this ongoing practice of stereotypical representations (de Orellana 1999, 65–110; García Riera 1987, 65–79)

La venganza clearly and emphatically responds to these stereotypes, as well as to the ideologically laden documentary representations produced by Mexican filmmakers during the revolution that constitute the balance of its footage. Padilla’s version of Villa’s life and role in the revolution subverts both national cinematic traditions through formal strategies that include reassembling gathered footage, mixing cinematic modes, and privileging repetition and spectacle over continuity. In doing so, the film participates in the broader postrevolutionary project of constructing (and reconstruct-ing) the revolution through “collective memory, mythmaking, and history writing” (Benjamin 2000, 19). Perhaps more pointedly, it participates, as did oral tradition and corridos, in the production of Villa as a regional and popular folk hero, in opposition to official silence on his legacy from the time of his death through the mid-1930s (McGee 2010, 428).2 (When Villa was, finally, portrayed in Mexican cinema it was as the coldhearted professional revolutionary in Fernando de Fuentes’s 1935 Vámonos con Pancho Villa.) Yet La venganza does not completely reject the racial and gender logic of the US film industry it so insistently repudiates. Instead, as I will discuss, it reverts to rhetorics of racial hierarchy and sexual violence intrinsic to the US imperialism that Villa raged against. In other words, while transgressive, the film is not necessarily progressive.

In analyzing the film’s formal strategies alongside the structural dimen-sions of its production and circulation, I seek to expand our understanding of the ways in which silent cinema reproduced and produced racial difference beyond simple binaries of black and white or WASP and ethnic other.3 La venganza provides evidence of the ways that Mexican spectators negotiated their racial identity by imaginatively engaging with and resisting images that denigrated and degraded them. Beyond adding to our understanding of the operations of race on screen during this period, this essay puts this

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early moment in Mexican American/Chicano film history in conversation with scholarship on Chicana/o cinema, with its focus on the politically progressive media produced in the wake of the civil rights movement. It is informed by recent work in Chicana/o and borderlands history that takes into account the specificities of Mexican regional history and critiques of the concept of the borderlands, which call for a more textured rendering of the border and its social complexity.4 Though the film’s hybridity aligns it with widely circulated characterizations of border identity and culture, I suggest that situating the film in the place and time in which it was pro-duced illuminates the complex ways in which race, gender, and citizenship are intertwined.5 What is more, the film’s problematic nationalism, what Rocha refers to as its “non–political correctness” (2003, 28), suggests the limitations of looking to the Mexican Revolution and its heroes as sources for an oppositional politics.

La venganza offers us a window onto how Mexican audiences’ experi-ences as spectators, which took place within the racially stratified context of local and regional social life, shaped their perceptions of the racist representational practices of American film production in the early twen-tieth century. Thus, investigating the relationship between the Padillas’ cinematic practice and border film culture allows us to see the ways in which oppositional cinematic practice is shaped by the structures and ideologies out of which it emerges. It is at the crossroads of material conditions and representational practices that my consideration of La venganza’s particular form of revenge begins.

Border Film Culture

La venganza was, to borrow Hamid Naficy’s description of transnational cinema, “created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cin-ematic practices” (2004, 134). Though nostalgic recollections of El Paso’s earliest movie theaters tend to privilege the experiences of Anglo audiences, a robust exhibition industry that catered to Spanish-speaking audiences on both sides of the border emerged in the 1910s and 1920s. These theaters were the product of the enormous growth of El Paso’s Mexican population and the racism that consigned Mexican audiences to separate sections of theaters or to completely separate theaters.

With the arrival of the railroad in the 1890s, which coincided roughly with the introduction of motion pictures, El Paso experienced an industrial and commercial boom. The growth of mining, construction, and agriculture,

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as well as the ancillary industries that served them, created a huge demand for laborers, a demand met by Mexican peasants seeking economic opportunities. In the decade after 1910, the Mexican Revolution led to a further influx of political and economic refugees. El Paso’s Mexican population almost doubled from 367,510 in 1910 to 700,541 in 1920 (García 1981, 35).

The fact that El Paso’s Mexican population was much larger than its Anglo population did not translate into political or economic power for Mexicans. Instead, El Paso was structured, according to historian Mario T. García, as a “class system tainted with racial prejudice” (1981, 85). Mexicans worked primarily in low-paying blue-collar jobs, while Anglo El Pasoans dominated the skilled trades and white-collar sectors. What is more, Mexicans were usually paid lower wages than their Anglo counter-parts, even when they performed the same jobs. In terms of housing, Mexicans were almost completely segregated from Anglo El Paso. Both longtime residents and new arrivals found housing in several barrios: the area along the border known as Chihuahuita, another barrio to the east near the cemetery, and two smaller communities to the north (127–55).6 De facto (customary rather than legal) segregation ruled schools (110) and commercial establishments such as stores, restaurants, and theaters (79–80).

Beginning just after the turn of the century, El Paso’s Anglo population had expressed concern about the city’s growing Mexican population, which they feared would lead to increased levels of disease. Anti-Mexican sentiment rose as Americans in Mexico and their properties were threatened or attacked by revolutionary forces. The revolution seemed poised to spill over the border, and refugees flooded the area. The presence of American troops, both white and black, mobilized by President Woodrow Wilson “just in case,” likewise contributed to interracial tension. When the revolution ended, patterns of racial discrimination, segregation, and barely concealed ethnic tensions continued to fester amid an ongoing influx of migrants, as El Paso became the primary entry point for Mexicans coming to the United States. This set the stage for the emergence of a parallel film culture (Serna 2009, 148–49).

El Paso’s Mexican theaters offered their audiences US-produced films, Mexican films when they were available, performative practices that drew on Mexican cultural traditions, and rhetorical exhibitions that promoted postrevolutionary nationalism. This parallel film culture encouraged par-ticipation in the modern social practice of moviegoing while at the same time reinforcing ties to Mexico (Serna 2009, 155–56). At the border, the domestic mass market, which drove the US film industry, faded into a segregated regional market, which in turn blended into a “foreign” territory.

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In this interstitial space, ethnic Mexican entrepreneurs positioned themselves as agents of modernity while seeking to satisfy the entertain-ment needs of El Paso’s Mexican residents. Félix Padilla was among those businessmen who saw an opportunity in exhibiting moving pictures to Mexican audiences. Though it is not clear precisely when it opened, by 1916 he and a partner, Pedro Maseo (sometimes listed as Pedro Maceo), operated the Imperial Theater in a neighborhood of Mexican and black families located near the Concordia cemetery in East El Paso (El Paso City Directory 1916). Despite the theater’s marginal location well outside the downtown area, the partners strove to make it elegant and comfortable. In 1915 they had outfitted the theater with red velvet chairs, ceiling fans, and a R. Wurlitzer “theater orchestra” (organ) that they purchased on installment.7 The 1917 El Paso City Directory lists Félix, who at the time lived in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as the theater’s sole proprietor. The theater was advertised (bilingually) two years later as the “most modern and well ventilated; daily change of programs, titles in Spanish,” indicating that Padilla actively sought the patronage of El Paso’s Spanish-speaking community (El Paso City Directory 1919, 429). Despite these efforts to decorate and advertise the theater, in 1922, after seven years in business, the Imperial disappears from the official record. Perhaps the theater, with its out-of-the-way location, could not compete with the numerous movie theaters catering to the Mexican trade that appeared near the international border crossing in the early 1920s.

At any rate, upon the Imperial’s closing Padilla turned his hand to itinerant exhibition.8 He and his son began to tour a regular circuit, visiting small towns on either side of the border in their Studebaker truck. They carried with them an Acme SV-Type G portable projector (commonly used in schools), a hand-cranked 78-rpm phonograph, a selection of records, a collection of used films, and lobby posters that could be tailored to fit each program and venue (Arias 2004; Padilla 1976). The Padillas obtained their somewhat dated films—westerns, comedies, and dramas—from a network of secondhand dealers by mail or on semiregular visits to Los Angeles (Arias 2004). In addition to the US-produced films they showed, Padilla also used his connections in Mexico City to obtain at least two Mexican productions just a few years after their initial release date, according to receipts dated 1928.9

The Padillas crisscrossed the border, working terrain neglected or underserved by the exhibition infrastructure in both countries. Those audiences, evidence indicates, had become accustomed to seeing films

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(primarily American) long after they had been released. For example, in August 1918 the US consul in Matamoros, Tamaulipas—one of the states that would form part of the Padillas’ circuit—wrote to the manger of the Pathé Exchange in Dallas to encourage American film men to turn their attention to northern Mexico. “[American] films shown here,” he noted, “are those brought from Mexico City, which are anywhere from five to ten years of age.”10 This lag persisted through the 1930s. In June 1931, according to advertisements in El Correo de Chihuahua, patrons of two major theaters in the state capital, the Teatro Estrella and the Cine Azteca, could choose from American titles produced a year or two earlier. Thus, the Padillas’ offerings would have been neither unusual nor unwelcome.

In the early 1930s Félix Padilla embarked on his own cinematic project, perhaps inspired by, as Gregorio Rocha speculates, the Mutual Film Company’s 1914 film The Life of General Villa.11 He would also have been encouraged by the obvious popularity of moviegoing and, perhaps, by his own love of cinema (Rocha 2003, 26). Putting together bits and pieces culled from the films he had in his cache, he began to construct and circulate his own version of Pancho Villa’s life, ultimately known as La venganza de Pancho Villa. Upon his death in 1936, his son Edmundo took over the project.

Félix Padilla’s experience as an exhibitor informed, indeed facilitated, his cinematic practice. Like other exhibitors he had experience putting programs together to accommodate time constraints and local tastes. He had access to all of the materials required to make a compilation film—a stash of old films, a camera, a cutting table—and he had connections to venues where audiences would appreciate the compelling repackaging of both racist and historical images from previous decades.

By 1937 the film, according to publicity material, had been exhibited as Pancho Villa en Columbus (Pancho Villa in Columbus); La venganza de guerrillero (The Revenge of the Warrior); Hazañas de Pancho Villa (Feats of Pancho Villa); and finally La venganza de Pancho Villa (The Revenge of Pancho Villa). Marketing material played to both sides of Pancho Villa’s mythical persona, calling him alternatively a “bandit” and the “eternal avenger of injustices” (Padilla Collection). The adjustments made to the film’s title and marketing materials suggest that Padilla repeatedly tweaked the narrative, perhaps to accommodate the tastes of his audience or because he considered the film a continuously evolving work in progress.

From the spotty accounting records that exist we know that substantial numbers of people in small towns on either side of the border paid to see the

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film (Padilla Collection). In addition to showing the film in small towns, perhaps borrowing a church wall or setting up a tent, the Padillas rented the film to cinema owners for a percentage of the ticket sales. In 1934, the year for which the most data exist, the film was seen by 221 adults and 19 children at the Cine Guerrero in Tampico, Tamaulipas; 500 adults and 94 children at the Teatro Ideal in Cárdenas, San Luis Potosí; and 299 adults and 21 children at the local theater in Tuxpan, Veracruz. When it was exhibited in Canutillo, Texas, a small town near El Paso, at the height of the Great Depression, the film earned $81.57 (Padilla Collection). In a region that had been the setting for a generous share of revolutionary conflict some years earlier, where Pancho Villa was a celebrated if sometimes controversial local hero, and where racial antagonism between Mexican and Anglo com-munities was ongoing, a film in which Villa takes his revenge on American troops not once, not twice, but three times found a ready audience.

Pancho Villa Rides Again and Again and Again

As its title suggests, the primary theme of La venganza de Pancho Villa is revenge. On the level of narrative, the film’s abbreviated version of Villa’s life story unfolds as a series of attacks on his enemies, primarily though not exclusively Americans. Though perennially popular in large parts of northern Mexico, in large part because of his defiant attitude toward the United States, Villa in the 1930s was a controversial revolutionary figure on a national level. Revenge also operates on the broader level of representation, as negative images of Villa in particular and Mexican men more generally are reassembled in a way that recuperates Villa and by extension all Mexican men from the stereotypical rhetoric employed by US studios to produce Mexican masculinity on screen. This reclamation of Villa is accomplished using four primary formal strategies: reassembling and recontextualizing footage gleaned from a range of sources, mixing cinematic modes, privileging repetition and spectacle over continuity, and offering audiences visual perspectives that encouraged identification with Villa.

Though perhaps unique in the border region, the Padillas’ cinematic practice of reassembling gathered footage to generate new meanings was not without precedent. Indeed, many of the feature films made during the Mexican Revolution were compilations or anthologies that recycled footage to provide up-to-date accounts or a broad historical overview of the conflict (Pick 2009, 13). As in contemporary films composed of found footage, this practice of reassembling gave “individual shots . . . implications that their

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original contexts suppressed” (Wees 1993, 13). In Wees’s formulation the political meaning of a compilation film is generated in the act of recon-textualizing images from completely unrelated sources. Padilla, in contrast, selected films, both American and Mexican, that took up the same theme, albeit from radically different perspectives.

The first tradition the film engages, and the one that has been most remarked by critics, is that of the US film industry’s portrayal of the Mexi-can Revolution and revolutionaries. While Mexico had been a consistent source of fascination for Anglo Americans throughout the nineteenth century, the popularization of photography and film turned the revolution into a mass media spectacle (de los Reyes 1985; Fox 1999; Vanderwood and Samponaro 1988). Extensive US media coverage of the Mexican Revolu-tion relied on established stereotypes of Mexicans as backward, racially inferior, and morally weak (Anderson 2000). Images of Mexican refugees camped at the border or of wartime executions were circulated in the form of picture postcards among American soldiers and local populations, becom-ing reliable evidence of Mexican backwardness and barbarity (Fox 1999, 83–85). Amid tensions arising from an increased military presence on the border, there was uncertainty about the conflict’s potential effects on US economic interests and rising anxiety about the stream of Mexicans flee-ing north to escape the turmoil. All this created an appetite for cinematic figurations of Mexico and Mexicans that affirmed Anglo superiority and justified American intervention in Mexican affairs.12

Pancho Villa, whom many perceived as a fictitious Mexican bandit come to life, proved more fascinating to the American public than any other revolutionary protagonist. Though all revolutionary leaders seemed keenly aware of the power of the mass media in garnering publicity, sway-ing public opinion, and documenting their role in the achievement of the revolution, Villa was particularly adept at mobilizing his image to attract support and material aid (Pick 2009, 40–41). Photographs of Villa (fig. 1), particularly from 1914, when he and his men seemed virtually unstoppable, were published regularly in major newspapers (as Zuzana Pick notes, many of these images were stills from The Life of General Villa). Villa was also the subject of numerous editorial cartoons (Anderson 2000).

Nowhere was Villa’s media presence felt more strongly than in film. In addition to being featured on a regular basis in the major US newsreels, Villa famously brokered an exclusive contract with the Mutual Film Company of New York, which gave the company access to the general and his men in exchange for much-needed cash. Villa, who at the time

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enjoyed American support, became the subject of the now-lost feature film The Life of General Villa, directed by Christy Cabanne (1914). That film, whose production is re-created in HBO’s 2003 feature film And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, used documentary and staged footage to offer a sympathetic account of Villa’s life story and to construct a fictional ending for the revolution in which Villa becomes president of Mexico. While The Life of General Villa presented a stereotyped but basically positive image of Villa, villainous Villa-like characters began to appear with frequency in US feature films after Villa’s audacious attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916—an attack that historians agree was at least partially an act of retaliation against the United States for shifting its support from Villa to his rival Venustiano Carranza.

Among the derogatory films are La venganza’s two primary source texts: the twenty-part Universal film serial Liberty: A Daughter of the USA (1916) and the five-reel feature Lieutenant Danny USA (1916). The former follows the tribulations of heroine Liberty Horton (Marie Walcamp), who is kid-napped and held for ransom by a bandit-revolutionary called Pancho Lopez (G. Raymond Nye). In the latter film, Lt. Danny Ward (William Desmond) is sent to the US-Mexico border as part of the United States’ preparedness

Figure 1. Pancho Villa in dress uniform in a photograph by Bain News Service that was copyrighted by the Mutual Film Company some-time between 1910 and 1916. It is likely that this photograph was taken in the first few months of 1914, as it appeared, cropped to show only Villa’s face, on the cover of the May 1914 issue of Reel Life, Mutual’s house publication. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (call no. LC-B2-3009-8).

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effort. There he becomes involved with the aristocratic Ysobel Ventura (Enid Markey), who, like Liberty, is the object of the depraved desire of Pedro Lopez (Robert Kortman) (fig. 2). As Gregorio Rocha observes, by selecting only those scenes from Liberty that feature the character of Pancho Lopez, La venganza recasts the character’s narrative significance (2003, 28–30). Specifically, while the serial, as its title and publicity suggests, focuses on the heroine as a figure for the relationship between whiteness, gender, and citizenship (fig. 3), the reassembled footage positions her as a nameless secondary character. Likewise, in the footage drawn from Lieuten-ant Danny, the film’s eponymous protagonist is nowhere to be seen.

The other tradition the film draws on and reshapes is that of Mexican documentary films that “visualized the revolution” (Pick 2009, 13). Though purporting to objectively document the episodes—battles, parades, and politi-cal events—of the revolution, these films were politicized from the outset. Whether in their editing of footage taken by a singular cameraman or team or in their assemblage of footage from previously released films, these films offered competing histories of the revolution. Their screenings, in Pick’s

Figure 2. Still from Lieutenant Danny USA (Triangle-Ince, 1916), showing Lt. Danny Ward (William Desmond) rescuing Ysobel Ventura (Enid Markey) from the clutches of the villain Pedro Lopez (Robert Kortman in brownface). Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

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words, “exalt[ed] the sponsors” of each film while also offering spectators an “occasion for acting out political allegiance or opposition” (13).

In La venganza disparate Mexican documentary sources have also been carefully edited to either glorify Villa or further a narrative about him as a revolutionary hero. For example, brief footage of constitutionalist soldiers and of General Alvaro Obregón can be found throughout the last half of the film. Here images of military activity are used not to glorify or docu-ment a military endeavor but rather to move forward the narrative about the conflict between Villa and other military leaders that emerged in the wake of the United States’ recognition of Carranza in 1915. Obregón is not a hero, though the context of the original footage may have been intended to portray him that way; rather, he is the source of Villa’s ire.

To offer another example, footage depicting Villa entering Mexico City in triumph and visiting the tomb of Francisco I. Madero, which makes use of footage from 1914 attributed to the Alva brothers, has been edited to minimize the presence of fellow revolutionary leaders. Throughout the

Figure 3. Advertising postcard for the Universal serial Liberty: A Daughter of the USA, 1916. The equivalence between the eponymous protagonist and American identity is made plain. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives Center, Warshaw Collec-tion of Business Americana: Motion Pictures, 1896–1963.

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film Villa is the only revolutionary leader who is shown in close-up, a strategy for highlighting his persona suggested at the outset of the film by a slow pan of Villa and his men. The camera returns to Villa, emphasizing that he is the central protagonist of, as a subsequent intertitle reads, the “intense historical drama of the Revolution.” In sum, documentary images of the Mexican Revolution work to buttress the characterization of Villa as an anti-imperialist hero rather than visualizing a complicated story of shifting allegiances or aligning Villa with a broader narrative of collective revolutionary triumph.

Beyond mixing images from divergent sources, the film juxtaposes fictional and nonfictional footage—two distinct modes of visualizing his-tory—and in so doing, alternates projections of Villa as a larger-than-life figure and a historical actor. Like the recontextualization of feature film footage, this mixing of cinematic modes reverses the dynamic through which Anglo representations of the revolution “neutralized the historical impact of revolutionary activity” (Fox 1999, 83). Mixing the two also sug-gests the contingent nature of historical reality, as “real” footage is given equal status with staged footage. Gregorio Rocha proposes a direct relation-ship between the documentary footage that appears at the beginning of each battle sequence, suggesting that this footage anchors the fictional battle sequences to real historical events (2003, 28). Beyond this function, putting the two types of footage side by side grounds the entire film in an explicitly Mexican perspective by tempering fictionalized representations with images drawn from an alternative cinematic tradition explicitly oriented toward providing a Mexican perspective on the revolution. It validates Villa’s heroics by aligning his character with potent, concrete emblems of political power and national identity. For example, the extended sequence showing Villa and his dorados parading into Mexico City features wide shots of marching and mounted soldiers, with the national cathedral and the Castle of Chapultepec (the presidential residence) in the background. Likewise, footage of Villa visiting the grave of assassinated revolutionary president Francisco I. Madero also shows Chapultepec. At the same time, the fictional footage, such as a close-up of Villa (G. Raymond Nye as Pancho Lopez) that dissolves into an image of a gnarling hyena, draws Villa into the realm of the mythic as it visualizes aspects of his folk hero persona, in this case his designation as “the hyena of the north” (fig. 4).

The primary locus of Villa’s anti-imperialist heroism resides, however, in the repeated (and repetitive) staging of his confrontations with the US military. La venganza presents a series of US military incursions into Mexican

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territory and Villa’s swift and uncompromising response. Two of these attacks are linked to historical events, though they are presented out of chronological order (in the film, the battle of Ojos Azules takes place before the attack on Columbus, New Mexico). More to the point, one of those battles, the confrontation at Ojos Azules, was an isolated moment of victory for the Pershing Expedition, which was sent into Mexico to find and capture Villa after the attack on Columbus. The film makes no reference to this Mexican defeat, instead linking that sequence neatly into the next, which is identi-fied in intertitles as the battle of Columbus, through scenes of villistas racing through the countryside on horseback. Both of these attacks build up to the spectacular final battle sequence that takes place not in real time but in the perpetual cinematic and social space of Anglo-Mexican conflict.

These sequences reverse the motivational logic of the US source texts in which Mexican depredations provoke Anglo punitive action. To offer an example that other critics have cited, the first of Villa’s three revenges is presented as a response not only to the present threat of US military intervention, but also to past events (Pick 2009, 71; Rocha 2003, 28). Shots of Villa (G. Raymond Nye) in close-up calling his men to action are intercut with shots of the city and port of Veracruz and with scenes, from another source, of US soldiers attacking the city’s population.13 “Here as

Figure 4. Screen shot from La venganza de Pancho Villa, with G. Raymond Nye as Pancho Lopez, the “hyena of the north.” Reproduced by permission of the Arias family.

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in Veracruz,” Villa proclaims, rallying his men (fig. 5). This sequence asks the film’s viewers—as Villa does his men—to connect Villa’s actions to past incursions into Mexican territory by US military forces. This flashback not only connects the narrative present to a historical event but also marks Villa

Figure 5. Screen shots from La venganza de Pancho Villa. “Here as in Veracruz” evokes the theme of revenge for past US attacks. Repro-duced by permission of the Arias family.

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as a historical subject with historical memory. In this way, his aggression toward the United States does not stem from his “Mexican nature,” as US feature films proposed, but rather from his status as a historical agent capable of critically evaluating past events and relationships of power.

Collectively, these battle sequences, replete with chases on horseback, gunfire, and death, constitute the emotional center of the film. One attack flows into the next, building excitement that explodes in the final, extended confrontation between American soldiers and the villistas (staged using footage from Lieutenant Danny and Liberty) from which Villa’s men emerge triumphant. In that sequence the Padillas employ shot-countershot to give audiences a unique perspective on events, like battles, that are difficult to render in other media. In this case, medium long shots of Villa’s men aiming their guns and firing alternate with close-ups of American soldiers falling under a rain of bullets (fig. 6). These sequences offer Mexican audiences, who regularly witnessed the defeat of the Mexican bandit-revolutionary on screen, the pleasure of experiencing Villa’s dominance over Anglo troops multiple times.

Indeed, the film offers Mexican viewers a subject position defined by visual dominance. Shots of the bodies of white Americans hanging from a tree after the Santa Ysabel Massacre, when Villa’s general, Pablo López, attacked a train carrying American engineers, reverses the economy of

Figure 6. American soldiers falling under an attack by Villa’s men. Screen shot from La venganza de Pancho Villa. Reproduced by permission of the Arias family.

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visual pleasure found in revolutionary-era picture postcards that depicted dead and often desecrated Mexican bodies. Among the most popular of the latter images were photographs of executions and of US soldiers grin-ning alongside the bodies of dead Mexican soldiers (fig. 7). They echo the lynching postcards that circulated in the American South in that era and prefigure the horrific images of Abu Ghraib yet to come (see Allen 2000; de los Reyes 1985; Vanderwood and Samponaro 1988, 114).

More insistently, throughout the battle sequences of the film, the Padillas have put together footage from disparate sources in such a way that Villa and his surrogates see the American soldiers, observe their movements, and identify their location without their knowledge. For example, in one sequence Villa (G. Raymond Nye) is shown in medium close-up peering off to the right of the frame with a pair of binoculars, technology that allows him to see over a long distance and aids him in formulating orders for his men (fig. 8). That shot is followed by images of US soldiers in medium long shot. The spectator assumes this implied point of view, watching the American soldiers setting up camp. This knowledge facilitates the villistas’ subsequent attack. Likewise, in the minutes leading up to the final battle sequence, two of Villa’s scouts peer out from a tree (the Padillas shot some of the footage themselves); this vantage point allows them to survey the American troops. Though it is unclear how they communicate with Villa (G. Raymond Nye), he subsequently turns his attention there as well.

Figure 7. Postcard by W. H. Horne that purported to show the body of villista general Pablo López. Images of Mexican degradation proliferated via picture postcards. Courtesy of El Paso Public Library, Otis A. Aultman Photo Collection.

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Though we must piece together Padilla’s method from the text, he clearly constructed his film with the goal of privileging Villa’s (or “the Mexi-can”) perspective. The film maps out the economy of vision and knowledge that characterized the Pershing Expedition, in which the American soldiers searched and searched but ultimately were unable to locate Villa and had to return to the United States empty-handed. Villa, we assume, watched their movements as he evaded them for months. In aligning the spectator’s vision with that of Villa (or the Villa-like character), the film also reverses the visual regime that ruled American feature films in which spectators were asked to identify with the white hero and his perspective.

Pick writes that La venganza is a “political gesture of self-affirmation” (2009, 65), a reading of the film supported by Rocha’s contention that the Padillas’ film can be understood as a precursor to the independent self-con-sciously nationalist Chicano cinema that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement. Certainly, in reclaiming Villa’s image from Hollywood’s racial paradigm and Mexico’s official silence on his role in the revolu-tion, the film performs an act of cultural resistance. But in its emphatic anti-imperialism, La venganza reproduces other forms of oppression that undermine both its heroic narrative and its anti-imperialist politics.

Figure 8. Screen shot from La venganza de Pancho Villa, showing the Mexican’s point of view as Villa watches US soldiers through binoculars. Reproduced by permission of the Arias family.

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The Politics of Visual Pleasure in the Borderlands

While La venganza acknowledges the animosity between Villa and the constitutionalists, especially in motivating the final battle sequence, the film elides the complexity of the revolution to create a historical account that revolves exclusively around the quest for national sovereignty. That is, the film unfolds as a struggle between Anglos and Mexicans over Mexican sovereignty (with a Spanish hacienda owner making an appearance and representing economic imperialism). As historians of the revolution have shown, the quest for sovereignty was a very powerful element of revolution-ary rhetoric, one that spoke to many Mexicans in northern Mexico and the US borderlands, whose daily lives were shaped by the unequal power relations with their North American neighbors.

As noted above, Anglo and Mexican residents of the region had long jockeyed for resources and social power, and the revolution had exacerbated latent racial antagonisms as refugees and expatriates expanded El Paso’s already large Mexican population. Villa and his shifting relationship with the United States had a direct effect on race relations in the region. In 1914, when Villa and his men engaged in one successful campaign after another, the United States favored Villa because of his pro-American stance. At times El Paso had welcomed Villa, serving as a provisioning point for his army. But as Villa’s fortunes turned in 1915 and he became a rebel, and then in the eyes of many a bandit once again, the Anglo press focused on Villa’s atrocities, real and imagined. He and his men were decried in the English-language press for killing (or threatening to kill) Americans and attacking local women.14

The dispatch of the Pershing Expedition, which was organized to find Villa in the wake of the Columbus attack, heightened anti-American sentiment and precipitated pro-Villa riots. In the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez region Mexicans on both sides of the border celebrated his audacity. That celebration became the focus of censure on the part of the white elite: they accused Mexican residents of El Paso of supporting an enemy of the United States, rounded up suspected Villa supporters on flimsy charges, and pressured the region’s Spanish-language papers to cease publishing pro-Villa articles (García 1981, 172–96). At the same time, other segments of the northern Mexican population lived in terror of Villa and his men, who roamed Chihuahua committing horrific acts of violence, such as the massacre of Mexican civilians at San Pedro de la Cueva, as well as looting

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properties and conscripting local men at gunpoint. Even after Villa “retired” to his hacienda with his men in 1920, he remained a controversial figure.

During the 1930s, the period in which La venganza was produced and circulated, anti-Mexican sentiment intensified in the border region and beyond. Across the United States, Mexicans, including US-born Mexican Americans, were accused of taking jobs from (white) American citizens. The massive repatriation movement that local and national officials pro-posed as a solution led to the deportation of over one million Mexicans and people of Mexican descent. Hundreds of thousands of repatriados were left at the border near Juárez with few or no resources (Balderrama and Rodríguez 1995, 113–16). La venganza’s interpretation of Villa’s role in the revolution—as anti-imperialist avenger of Mexico and Mexicans—clearly speaks to this history of racial tension in the region.

Given the film’s rejection of Anglo racist domination over Mexicans, the emergence in the third reel of a comic sequence that turns on disdain for African American soldiers comes as a surprise, at least to contemporary audiences. The short sequence is introduced by an intertitle: “En seguido mostramos los despojos de la batalla del Carrizal, Chih., otro descalabro de la expedición punitiva” (Next we’ll show the spoils of the battle of Carrizal, Chihuahua, another misfortune of the punitive expedition). That title is followed by footage from Hearst’s International News Pictorial Number 54 showing African American soldiers, captured during the clash between the all-black 10th Cavalry and constitutionalist troops in June 1916, being escorted back over the international border by Carranza’s troops. The African American soldiers look tired, as one might expect of POWs. Some of them are in their undershirts, others in ripped trousers. Few of them look directly into the camera, which is positioned to capture them as they move through the narrow space created by columns of US troops at the left of the frame and Mexican troops at the right (fig. 9). Their disheveled state is emphasized by a mocking intertitle that interrupts the extended shot: “Si no perdieron sus vidas, perdieron sus pantalones” (If they didn’t lose their lives, they lost their pants).

The “joke” here turns on the abjection of soldiers stripped of both their uniforms and their racial identity. Brief as it is, it forms an intertext with the region’s shifting racial landscape. Mexico, as historians have documented, had been seen by African Americans in general and slaves in particular as a refuge from the racism of the American South (Horne 2005; Tyler 1972). Villa had been a popular figure in El Paso’s small African American

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community, which maintained a cordial and sometimes intimate relation-ship with the city’s large ethnic Mexican community (Romo 2005, 206).

The Pershing Expedition marked a shift in these relations. As historian Gerald Horne explains, African American soldiers’ involvement in polic-ing the US-Mexico border and their role in the Pershing Expedition led to racial tension between the two groups (2005, 133–55). At the battle of Carrizal the 10th Calvary engaged constitutionalist troops, killing dozens of Mexican soldiers before losing the battle. Fourteen black soldiers were killed and twenty-three were taken prisoner. For Mexicans, the battle came to stand for African American complicity with the United States’ imperialist project. Put another way, many Mexicans on both sides of the border perceived that black soldiers’ role in shoring up United States power and maintaining order, including racial order, pitted African Americans and Mexicans against each other.

In contrast, African Americans viewed black participation in the Pershing Expedition and the dissemination of images of that participation as evidence of their citizenship. In Chicago, as film studies scholar Jacqueline Stewart notes, black audiences applauded the race film A Trooper of Troop K (directed by Harry A. Gant, 1917), which presented popular black actor

Figure 9. African American soldiers crossing the International Bridge at the US-Mexico border. Screen shot from La venganza de Pancho Villa. Reproduced by permission of the Arias family.

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Noble Johnson in a fictionalized account of the battle of Carrizal (Stewart 2005, 204 –7). The battle again appears as a marker of black citizenship in Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920). In that film, protagonist Dr. V. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas) cites African American soldiers fighting for their country at Carrizal, and also in “Cuba under the command of Roosevelt” and “later in France,” as evidence that black Americans “were never immi-grants.” Indeed, an advertisement for the original Hearst Newsreel framed the return of the prisoners in explicitly national terms by identifying the black soldiers clearly and proudly as American citizens (Stewart 2005, 205).

Recasting these images as comedy highlights the tension between race and citizenship on the border: the Mexican spectator’s implied position vis-à-vis the black soldiers is one of superiority. This dynamic emerged in other moments of spectatorship related to the battle of Carrizal. For example, when El Paso hosted a parade celebrating the African American soldiers, who the El Paso Herald reported had been booed and jeered by residents of Ciudad Juárez as they returned (“Much Jeering and Hooting,” June 29, 1916), the city’s Mexican population was notably absent (Romo 2005, 208). A similar dynamic was at play in one of El Paso’s movie theaters in 1917. When a film the El Paso Herald identifies as The Battle of Carrizal (which may well have been A Trooper of Troop K) played at an East El Paso theater (perhaps even Padilla’s own), the “Mexican citizens of El Paso” were reported to have “applauded wildly” when a black soldier fell from his horse. They “yelled their response,” a response we can assume was approving, to the execution of a black soldier after he pleaded for his life (“The Battle of Carrizal,” September 10, 1917). If the film had played for a black audience the film might have evoked feelings of pride and identification. In this instance, however, the film generated an altogether unsympathetic response from an audience for whom those images of black soldiering represented not just US imperialism but also the tangled morass of racial hierarchy on the border in which Mexicans and blacks were pitted against each other.

The nexus between race and masculinity, overlaid in the Carrizal sequence with the issue of citizenship, permeates La venganza. The film’s anti-imperialist narrative of revenge against the United States is punctu-ated at regular intervals by scenes of racialized sexual violence. The fear of interracial sex woven through films such as Liberty, in which the entire narrative hinges on the anxiety provoked by Pancho Lopez’s kidnapping of Liberty Horton, is reversed to make menacing white women part of Villa’s heroism.

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In the first ten minutes of the film the villistas celebrate their Torreón victory at a hacienda. Soldiers drink and feast at a long, candelabra-bedecked wooden table positioned diagonally across the frame. Villa (G. Raymond Nye) sits in the foreground, playing dice with another man. The image of a bound woman, her vulnerable body clearly the stakes of the game, is superimposed over the next shot, a close up of the dice and cup on the table. Villa, as one might suspect, wins the wager and in the next shot rises and moves toward the closed door. In a medium shot he opens the door to reveal the bound woman cringing in fear before him as the scene fades to black (fig. 10).

After only a brief sequence in which the workers of a hacienda are executed en masse by Villa and his men, we again find Pancho Villa (Robert Kortman) threatening another white woman (the Ysobel Ventura charac-ter played by Enid Markey). In an exterior shot Villa pulls the struggling woman to him and toward a door. The next shot reveals a bedroom interior. Crosscutting shows his menace and her fear, expressed physically in one shot as she reaches out in supplication toward a cross hanging on the wall. Subsequent shots show both of the characters as he grabs her and the two entwine in struggle before this scene too fades to black.

Figure 10. Villa (here G. Raymond Nye as Pancho Lopez) approaches his gambling winnings. Screen shot from La venganza de Pancho Villa. Reproduced by permission of the Arias family.

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In the very next sequence, Villa claims a white woman—this time the daughter of a Spanish hacienda owner—as part of his spoils. As his men are hard at work carrying loot out of a storeroom, a blonde woman is dragged across the foreground of the scene like a sack of supplies. As she is deposited in front of Villa (G. Raymond Nye) on the hacienda’s patio, her lips move, but it is Villa’s voice the audience “hears” in the form of an intertitle that reads “Caramba que hallazgo” (translated on the title card as “By Jove, this sure is luck”). The Villa character proceeds to violate the separation between men of color and Anglo women established in films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) as he reaches out for the woman and attempts to kiss her. This act occupies the center of the frame, surely as spectacular as any of the battle scenes. A white woman will also be kidnapped in the sequence that shows the attack on the train carrying American engineers at Santa Ysabel, and again in the aftermath of the attack on Columbus, when two of Villa’s men swoop up a female figure running down the road: “En el campo, ya de retirada los villistas se roban una güera” (In the countryside, as they retreated, the villistas kidnapped a blonde girl).

This characterization is consistent with the film’s overall focus on Villa as a righteous but ruthless defender of Mexico against US imperialist incursions. It would be easy to attribute these multiple scenarios of racial-ized sexual violence to the limitations of Padilla’s source material. In those films it is precisely the danger to the white heroine (and we might consider the aristocratic Spanish maiden of Lieutenant Danny nominally white) that fuels their drama. But the Padillas’ decision to reproduce them deserves closer scrutiny. Though Mexican men’s supposed threat to American (read white) women along the border was widely discussed in the press, it was seldom noted that Mexican women were vulnerable to attacks by white men—soldiers, immigration officials, and others—as their plight was of little interest to the Anglo press (Ruiz 1998, 3–32). At the same time, Ana María Alonso (1995) observes that gendered violence, particularly rape, was as often a tool of revenge or domination between different Mexican social groups as it was a weapon in interracial conflicts. This was certainly true during the revolution: Villa’s men were infamous for kidnapping and raping women wherever they went.

Thus, the racial logic of the film replaces one set of power relations defined by the intersection of gender and race with another. If, in the visual economy of American silent cinema, spectators were encouraged to identify with the white woman threatened by the sexual depravity of the Mexican (or African American or Asian) man, and to cheer her rescue

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by the white hero, in La venganza threatening white women with sexual violence becomes the mark of heroism. Rather than setting up the threat and its neutralization, as in the famous Little Sister sequence in Birth of a Nation—what Rosa Linda Fregoso calls “the colonialist fantasy of white womanhood under siege” (2003, 51)—here the ellipses between shots imply violent intimacy.15 The power of this rhetoric lies in the fact that the film’s Mexican audiences would have been keenly aware of the racial logic of its intertexts, as American films constituted the bulk of the films exhibited in theaters serving Mexican audiences on either side of the border. Thus, in La venganza, texts that would seem to be fixed in their meaning are reconfigured to achieve an inversion, though not an erasure, of the power dynamics they present.

Conclusion

During the second decade of the twentieth century, when the films Félix Padilla used to create La venganza were produced, white American anxiety about the Mexican Revolution dovetailed with a growing discourse on “the Mexican problem.” Circulating in print, in political speech, and perhaps most widely in film, these discourses positioned Mexicans at best as child-like and at worst as a threat to the body politic. At a moment when the American film industry was solidifying its dominant position in markets all over the world, including Mexico, Mexican characters and settings were mobilized, as Manthia Diawara has noted of black images, “primarily for the pleasure of white spectators” (1988, 71). Mexican audiences on both sides of the border were positioned simultaneously as a market for the US film industry’s products and as part of its racial imaginary. They continued to occupy this contradictory position throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s as anti-Mexican hysteria grew.

Padilla’s film marshaled existing footage in the service of a narrative that borrowed liberally from the dominant cinema of both the United States and Mexico to create a nationalist spectacle that would put the most action-packed western to shame. Both the materials from which La venganza was made and the form they took in the Padillas’ hands emerged from the specific economic and social conditions that governed the circula-tion, exhibition, and reception of films along the US-Mexico border. The material conditions of Félix Padilla’s labor as an exhibitor of secondhand films to audiences in small towns, a market on the margins of what the mainstream film industry considered a secondary audience for its products,

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gave him access to the building blocks of his own narrative about the revolution. The social structure of the region, one marked by social and economic inequality, determined the shape those materials would take.

Racial conflict in its spectacular form, represented by events such as the attack on Columbus, and in its more quotidian forms, such as the daily reality of segregated viewing spaces that marked border film culture, reverberates in the visual economy of the film where Mexicans become the victors and Mexican characters the target of spectatorial identification. It is not difficult to imagine the thrill that Mexican audiences on either side of the border got from seeing Villa emerge victorious from his multiple encounters with American troops in La venganza. He was, after all, a regional hero, and the anti-imperialist stance he took midway through the revolution resonated with many Mexicans who lived with Anglo discrimi-nation along the US-Mexico border.

In its production and form, La venganza anticipates both the explicit oppositional politics of the cinema that emerged out of the Chicano movement and the make-do aesthetic of contemporary border cinema. Like Chicano cinema, the film resists racist images, affirms a devalued culture, and recuperates the Chicano/Mexican masculinity denigrated or ignored in mainstream cinema. Like the producers of the B films that María Arbeláez designates cine-fronterizo (2001, 177–98), the Padillas employed a cost-saving, flexible mode of production and used a nontraditional system of distribution with the aim of capturing the attention and entertainment dollars of border audiences. Beyond its relationship to contemporary Chicano and border cinema practice, La venganza’s unique production and distribution history suggests that the history of border film culture, like the border itself, has been and continues to be a “contested site of struggle” between various racial and social groups (Klahn 2009, 127).

As Chicano activists would decades later, the Padillas looked to Pancho Villa and Mexican history as resources for articulating an oppo-sitional politics of resistance. Like some of the cultural texts produced during the early years of the Chicano movement, La venganza de Pancho Villa reproduces the “masculinist orientation” of many nationalist projects (Fregoso 2003, 76–77).16 The film allows spectators to repudiate American cinema’s racist representations, only to replace them with other forms of racial and gender oppression. In reversing the roles assigned to Anglos and Mexicans in the US-produced visual discourse that circulated about the revolution, it leaves their fundamental terms of representation—axes of power tied to race and gender—intact. Outside the frame, for example,

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are the ethnic Mexican residents of Columbus whom Villa’s men took no pains to spare, or the entire scope of Villa’s own political maneuvering vis-à-vis the United States.

The Padillas’ contribution to the regional historiography of the revolution, transgressive in its creation of an oppositional narrative of Mexican dominance, demonstrates the limitations of an oppositional cinema produced within the constraints of commercial cinema.17 In the first few decades of the twentieth century, segregated viewing contexts in the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez region nurtured oppositional readings and acts of imagination that converted villains into heroes. But Mexican spectators, if the film’s efforts to address them are any indication, also hungered for the thrills and emotions stirred by cinematic narratives about the battle between good and evil that could be found in mainstream US cinema. Those narratives invariably featured damsels, but sometimes also nationalist projects, in need of rescue.

NotesThe writing of this essay was made possible by an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and by funding from the Provost’s Office of the University of Southern California. I am grateful to Mark Garrett Cooper, Shelley Stamp, Kathryn Flom Kline, the members of the Houston Area Writing Group, especially Raul Ramos, and my anonymous readers for their feedback and suggestions. I am indebted to the Arias family for their generosity and to the staff of the University of Texas at El Paso Library’s Special Collections for their assistance.

1. The film consists of surviving footage and was reconstructed according to the Padillas’ production notes and Félix’s collection of phonographic records that were donated by his family to the American Film Institute in 2004. My analysis of the film is based on a digitized copy of this footage provided to me by Gregorio Rocha. As Rocha has noted, some footage is missing from this version, particularly material related to Villa’s early life. Rocha came upon the film while researching his documentary Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa (Conaculta/Fonca, 2003), which chronicled his search for the lost Mutual Film Company footage of Villa from the film The Life of General Villa (1914).

2. Indeed, Villa’s contribution to the revolution was not officially recognized by the Mexican government until the 1960s. See McGee (2010).

3. On the racial/racist dimensions of silent cinema, see Bernardi (1996). To date, Chicana/o silent cinema spectators have received scant scholarly attention save in the work of Curtis Marez (2004) and Rosa Linda Fregoso (2003).

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4. Seminal works in Chicano film history are those by Noriega (2000) and Fregoso (1993). Attention to the particularities of northern Mexico and Mexican regional histories is most apparent in historical work on the borderlands region. For an overview of this work, see Gutiérrez and Young (2010). Anthropologist Pablo Vila offers a strong critique of the concept of the borderlands as developed in cultural studies (2003, 309–36).

5. This intersectionality has been a primary concern of recent scholarship in Chicano studies. It links the final essays featured in The Chicano Studies Reader (Noriega et al. 2010) and is, as the editors of the anthology Chicana Feminisms note, an animating principle of Chicana feminist writing and scholarship (Arredondo et al. 2003).

6. Elite Mexican refugees occupied homes in an upper-class area of town, Sunset Heights. See Macías González (2001).

7. Papers related to Félix Padilla’s motion picture exhibition business and La venganza de Pancho Villa; henceforth cited as Padilla Collection. These papers were lent by Padilla’s great-granddaughter Magdalena Arias to Gregorio Rocha, in whose hands they remain. I viewed these papers at Rocha’s home in Morelia, Michoacán, in 2006. The family plans to donate them to an archive so that they will be readily available to scholars.

8. Itinerant exhibition persisted in rural areas of the United States through the 1930s. In Mexico, such practices continued through the 1940s and on occasion in very remote areas as late as the 1970s. On itinerant exhibition in the United States, see Fuller (1996) and Potamianos (2002); on the practice in Mexico, see Fox (2002). Félix’s itinerant business is the subject of an impressionist documentary film by Gregorio Rocha, Acme and Co.: Historias del cine viajero (Conaculta, 2006).

9. Padilla Collection.10. “Communication from the American Consul Matamoros, Tamps., Mexico

to Pathé Exchange, Dallas, Texas, August 16, 1918,” 802.4061/10, Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Mexico 1910–1929, Microfilm Reel 148.

11. Rocha (2003, 26) suggests that The Life of General Villa may have been the basis for Padilla’s film. He notes that the stills used for the lobby cards are actual frame enlargements from that film, though it is unclear what if any footage from that film was used in La venganza.

12. Margarita de Orellana’s La mirada circular (1999) details North American representations of the revolution in both documentary and fictional film. She argues that these images said more about the United States than they did about the revolution.

13. The source of this footage is unclear. Several American and Mexican filmmakers shot footage of the battle and its aftermath. Aurelio de los Reyes (1986, 96) indicates that the film La invasion norteamericano o los sucesos de Veracruz was exhibited in May 1914 at the Salón Star in Mexico City, but it is not clear who made the film.

14. On anxiety about the activities of Villa and his forces, see, for example, “Two Americans Killed by Mexicans,” El Paso Herald, February 29, 1916, 1; “1000 Ranchers to Seek Villa,” El Paso Herald, February 28, 1916, 10; “Villa Waits to

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Kill Americans,” El Paso Herald, March 2, 1916, 1. For descriptions of the villista threat to women, see “Mexican Youth Attacks Woman,” El Paso Herald, June 20, 1916, 4; “Villa Kills Two American Men and Women,” El Paso Herald, March 8, 1916; and “Brave Carranza Consul Slain Trying to Save Women,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1916.

15. It is important to note that while many silent films produced in the United States were staged so that nonwhite characters (typically male) and their white objects of desire never touched, as in the paradigmatic Little Sister sequence in Birth of a Nation, other narratives existed in which the white woman was in fact carried off bodily by the racialized other. Liberty is an example of the latter type of film. This suggests that the race-sex dynamic in American silent film may need to be analyzed anew. I am grateful to Mark Garrett Cooper for drawing my attention to this distinction, which is easy to overlook given Birth of a Nation’s place in the study of race and cinema.

16. For example, in her assessment of Chicana writing, Naomi H. Quiñonez offers Maria Herrera Sobek’s poem “Grandmother and Pancho Villa” as an example of Chicana feminists’ critique of masculinist nationalism. She writes, “In this poem Pancho Villa is stripped of his heroic role in the center of Chicano nationalism and is exposed as another manifestation of patriarchy” (2002, 144).

17. On the paradoxical position of Chicana/o media producers who sought to articulate social protest and reform the mass media industries, see Noriega (1996). A similar tension between revolution and inclusion animates La venganza. This argument is expanded in Noriega’s account of the history of Chicano cinema, Shot in America (2000).

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La Venganza de Pancho Villa: Resistance and Repetition

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